On Other Blogs Today: The Minimum Wage, Microhousing, and More

Our daily roundup.

1. The Billfold reports that women overwhelmingly support increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, regardless of whether they're low-income or higher-income earners. In fact, 59 percent of women earning between $100,000 and $200,000 said they supported such an increase. Men, not so much: The only group of men in which a majority said they supported a higher minimum wage was those earning less than $25,000 a year; in every group earning more than that, men opposed a $15 minimum.

2. Josh Trujillo, the staff photographer at the PI.com, has a moving visual essay about the vigil held yesterday for the 17-year-old Nepalese national who was killed in a crosswalk this week while walking to school at the North Seattle Community College in Northeast Seattle.

The student, named Sandhya Khadka, had hoped to become an accountant, and was hit while trying to cross the street to catch the Number 41 bus in the Pinehurst neighborhood.

Trujillo got some powerful images, including this one of a double rainbow that appeared during the vigil for Khadka (reprinted from Seattlepi.com with permission):

3. Making the case against design review requirements for microhousing (tiny units that typically share a kitchen, typically rented by low-income people, students, and part-time Seattle residents), Smart Growth Seattle's Roger Valdez (I know, I know—but it's a really smart piece!) argues that forcing such small apartment developments to go through design review will increase the cost of renting such units by more than $1000 a year, on average, without improving the quality of units.

The city council, Valdez writes—which is currently considering a new set of rules restricting microhousin, including design review and community-notification requirements—should, instead of "impos[ing] a meaningless, expensive, time consuming process that will lead to no public benefits, will be paid for by renters, and reduce the supply of available microhousing units when developers build fewer units or have to raise rents," adopt new rules that will "make life easier for people ... who are trying to improve their circumstances and use microhousing as a launching pad for a whole new life."

4. Seattle Transit Blog's Martin Duke has a reality check on King County Metro's revenue projections, noting that Metro's projection of 17 percent cuts if voters fail to pass a new vehicle license fee and sales tax increase by April 22 (get your ballots in now!) have always been approximate. "If Prop 1 fails, the cuts might be above or below 17%, with more weight on the low side," Duke writes. That doesn't in any way diminish the fact that the cuts will be devastating to actual Metro riders, who will see cuts of more than 15 percent if the Metro funding measure doesn't pass.